1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of telecommunications, and pertains more particularly to electronic systems for aiding participants in electronic voice communications.
2. Description of Related Art
An important application of embodiments of the present invention is in aiding agents of an enterprise engaged in telephone communication with customers, potential customers or clients, but there are other applications as well. In the situation of enterprise agents, much such activity occurs in what have been termed in the art call centers. With increased use of Internet telephony, text communication like emails and instant messaging, and other modes of communication like chat rooms, call centers are more properly referred to by the term communication centers.
In a typical communication center a plurality of agents operate at workstations typically interconnected on a local area network (LAN) with telephone switches, servers of various sorts, and often intelligent routers that queue incoming transactions and route them to available agents, often by skill and other attributes as well as availability.
Communication centers are used by a wide variety of enterprises, such as credit card companies, banks, service organizations for manufacturers of electronic devices, and many more. In some cases communication centers are at least partially dedicated to outbound calling, for sales, political campaigns, and other purposes. In nearly all cases of agents interacting with callers and people who answer outbound calls, there is a particular purpose, such as selling a product or providing service or billing information to callers. Because of the focused purpose of nearly all such centers, agent scripting has become a common practice, and is well known in the art.
In agent scripting there is typically a scripting engine, and prompts may be provided to agents as, for example, a pop-up on a computer screen at the agent's workstation. Such instructions may also be provided by recorded audio, and scripted agent greetings are common.
Still, even though the purpose in a communication center may be common, and the callers or recipients of calls may be engaged with agents in this common purpose, there are still many variants that may take place in communications. It is not possible to know ahead of time what is in the mind of a caller, and, as is always true in interpersonal communication, there are many directions a conversation may take. In many cases, as a conversation progresses, new information is needed and new directions might prove to be profitable.
So in the present state of the art in agent/client interaction there may be a purpose, an expectation, a script and perhaps data provided, such as a customer identity and profile, and further information about the customer, collected from, for example, a customer information server. But after the interaction begins, it is often the case that the information collected may be found to be incomplete or incorrect. An agent at a financial institution, for example, may have scripted information that a caller owns a house, has a mortgage (not in arrears), and has two credit cards with substantial balances. It may happen that, during an early part of the conversation, the customer tells the agent she has sold her house, paid off her credit cards, and is interested in a line of credit in order to open up a new business in a new town. In this situation there will not be any “check boxes” on the agent's screen that can tell him what to do, and the agent may type up notes in free form to summarize the situation. The call may end gracefully, such as by the agent's saying “I understand, ma'am, and as soon as those transactions enter the system you should be able to get this taken care of” (translation: “I can't help you because my system doesn't understand this situation, and I don't have the right information.”)
When dealing with human interactions, procedural, pre-designed flows are unlikely to be robust enough to deal with almost sure-to-happen variations. A person may call, for example, to discuss an advertisement they received for a line of credit loan, but they may have overdue credit card bills, have too low a score for a line of credit, but have significant home equity—and they may do their checking at another institution. It is unlikely that any business has built scripts to handle this situation, or ever would.
Given the above what is clearly needed is recursive, adaptive interactive management method and system that can “listen in” on a conversation, and can aid an agent in real time. The present invention in a variety of embodiments provides just such a system and method.